Nobel 'a Royal Flush' For Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was out grocery shopping near her home in London yesterday when the Swedish Academy announced she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. She returned from the store to find a media circus, the wire services reported.

"This has been going on for 30 years," Lessing told the journalists. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."

Holding an impromptu news conference, the prickly Lessing said, "I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. . . . I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

Jonathan Burnham of HarperCollins, Lessing's publisher in the United States, was at the Frankfurt Book Fair when the announcement was made. "Doris is one of the most important writers of this generation," he said from Germany. "And as a woman writer, she has broken through boundaries and given inspiration to a whole new generation."

For six decades, British novelist Lessing has written works of fiction that explore the sometimes painful intertwining of the political and the personal.

In awarding her the prize-of-all-writing-prizes, the academy championed Lessing as "that

epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Lessing's work had been of great importance both to other writers and to the broader field of literature, academy secretary Horace Engdahl told Reuters. He said members of the academy had discussed her as a potential laureate for years.

"Now the moment was right. Perhaps we could say that she is one of the most carefully considered decisions in the history of the Nobel Prize," Engdahl told the news service. "She has opened up a new area of experience that earlier had not been very accepted in literature. That has to do with, for instance, female sexuality."

Just a few days shy of her 88th birthday, Lessing has lived on three continents and is largely self-educated. She was born to British parents in Iran, then known as Persia. Her father was a banker, her mother a former nurse. The family later moved to southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. At 7, Lessing went to a convent boarding school.

According to the academy's official biography, Lessing quit school at 14 and worked at a parade of jobs, including nanny, stenographer and journalist.